linky linky linky



Again and again, Love all the hard work you guys are doing on the XML viewers.

i still like my cards hidden !!!

damn it !

Not to mention a good hand does not necessarily mean you will win.

Not only that but those who are good at (we'll stick with your analogy) "Poker" do not always need to see what cards are in your hand to have idea of, or know, what you have.

Well then, this was a pleasing surprise to come home to. </sarcasm>

Its not so fun to work for a while on a project, then find hate mail, and forum spam about how evil/dumb it is. Cussing me out and calling me all manner of names isn't so great either.

Because of that, I'll be blunt. As long as there's an XML feed (which, by the way, is provided by NCSoft, I'm not stealing your bandwidth, and have absolutely no access to your computer) provided, my character sheet viewer will stay up. In addition, because I feel the XML is a cool thing, I support NCSoft's decision to make it available. I intend to keep working on the site to show more and more data as time goes on.

I've PvP'd in other games, and no this does NOT affect how much ya lose, unless you're just bad to begin with. Nor does this give anyone an unfair advantage, the service is open for all. "Security by Obscurity" is typically neither secure, nor obscure.

Please keep in mind I *could* make a kick butt site for just myself, to view other's gear. I could allow just certain people access, or could publish certain other's gear for fun all over the place. I'm choosing, instead, to allow freedom of the information for all.

In the end, all I see in here is personal attacks. The one argument that my Character Sheet Viewer (I'm only saying mine, because Demos didn't get this nasty of a response) will hinder PvP is unfounded, at least within these posts. There has been intelligent discussion of the effect this XML has on PvP, so I urge you to vent over there.

Thanks for your time, and the private message,

Thanks LegendRunner. What I meant by 'personal attacks' were the posts by a few individuals who spent their time cursing me, claiming I've "killed" PvP and the game, and PMed me with stuff along the same lines.

Until now I got a great (in my opinion) response from the users, and I believe Demos did as well. I'm grateful for those users who've used my service (over 10000 views so far) who have appreciated it.

Don't misunderstand me, I've enjoyed this community (until today) and will continue to develop the viewer in order for the users who like it to continue using it.

Thanks,

Snarky,

I hope you don't let a few contrary opinions deter you in developing this wonderful service. THEY need to realize that:

* NCSoft not individual third party developers decided to expose the XML data (which is a good thing btw; many other games does the same)
* Having access to a viewer doesn't give you an advantage or disadvantage in PvP. Most PvPers from what I seen swap out gear and skills on the fly and the gear in your inventory isn't shown.
* PvP takes a fair amount of skill and there are some players that even if you knew in advance what they were bringing to the table, it wouldn't change the result
* Only poor players rely on gimmicks and while that will allow them to defeat the bottom rung of players, it won't matter against top notch competition

As for me, I applaud you for work. I am proud to display my characters via your viewer for all to see.

Well, just to get my two cents in since I've never given snarky (and Demon, not to diminish his accomplishment with his xml viewer) any "bravos" for his work...BRAVO!

I try very hard to have poise and sound as intelligent as possible when I disagree with an idea or post a counterpoint to a valid argument, and misspelling "destory" 3 times in a post is hardly a good way to show that you have the ability to be a little analytical with your thoughts.

On that note, I cant believe that you received pm's of "hate mail" snarky - that's just childish - and anyone reading this that has such thoughts about snarkys (and demon's) creations should post them publicly, so THEY can be belittled themselves for their childish maturity level.

The best way I can equate this situation with the xml viewer to somehow being "cheating" or an "exploit" in pvp is to ask all of you to think of the good ol' FPS games like Goldeneye, Quake, and Halo(s). There's ONE TV screen, 4 ppl playing, with FOUR little mini-screens, at once. Anybody's eyes can wander to anyone else's screen to see what they're doing, where they are, etc (in essence, as my brother put it when we were kids - CHEATING - bc my other brother would apparently do it all the time, and that was how he got beaten). Now, I never looked at another screen except for fun sometimes, bc I was focused on what I was doing - and 8 times out of 10, I won (which pissed the "cheating" brother off to no end....HOW'D YOU KNOW WHERE I WAS??!!! I QUIT!) So, does having this xml viewer really destROy pvp...

Well, it does if you're my brother I guess.

So, just like I told him - quit whining, and maybe if you worry more about playing YOUR character, then maybe you'll win more. What are you gonna do when someone else gets the job, college placement, etc., that you want instead of you?

Don't look for an excuse for your ineptitudes kids, look for solutions, and along the way don't try and belittle people for THEIR accomplishments - it's petty.

/end preach. lol

Alrighty then... I somehow managed to get more work done today, the second half of the tooltip junk. Now when you click on a tooltip, it'll pop the info up to the top of the page. You can copy and paste from here.

Be careful, however, I've set it up currently so that clicking on the new div will hide it again, to clear up the screen. To copy and paste, make sure you click and drag, that won't close the div.

Hope you enjoy! After this I'm gonna work on caching to increase my speed!

Oh, and to those that noticed a speed problem today, that was 'cause of the issue with NC's servers. The character XML wasn't getting pushed out in a very reasonable time, but it looks better as of now.

Thanks!

Funny of you to put a link to bitburger in your sig

DarthNinja
lvl 100 Arch Ninja

Hmm..

Well it appears those dreaded network connections have plagued me as well. For a bit this afternoon my site was getting 404 errors instead of XML feeds. It is back up, but if the problem happens again I'll leave the site down until i can talk with the devs or (better) their network team and make sure I'm not being perceived as a DoS attack.

In the meantime, I'm making the following concession to the PvPer's, as well as the network staff:
I'm reworking the site to use a database. Yes, this means I'll actually store your information, but it will make me hit DR's server MUCH less often. Once a character has been seen once, it'll be updated every hour (I'll probably tweak that depending on talks with DR/players) and only shown from my local cache. This way, unless you get lucky and fight at the very instant I update, AND DR updated you that instant, you're data will be too old to be of use to an enemy.

I hope to complete this change over the weekend, have a good night!

Wow, now people don't have to learn any strat or skills at all, they just punch in the name of their favorite character and copy copy copy. I kinda feel violated.

Oh yes, viewing people's profiles really exposes all of your "skills". Which, in DR, mostly involves getting lucky and wearing the best equipment.

I have 1 pvp win and 0 pvp losses, a perfect record. You missed my point though, I wasn't referring to pvp, I was referring to the game in general.

I hate to say it phobic, but there probably 157 copies of your character running around at any given time. Its not really YOUR character, its the result of the way that you decided to match skills, gear, etc that ended up as a result - I'm pretty sure its not your proprietary blend. Along those lines, 95% of all shadow mage builds are the exact same, and people are asking for build guides for characters all day long - which is essentially using the same skills/gear that someone else used all THEIR game to build your own character.

I'd be honored if someone asked me how I was building a character so they could try the same thing - it's not like we all work/play for some secret government agency testing new mmorpgs for military use (are we...?) On a note though, I do support Asheda suggestion that they implement the ability to "turn off" third party viewing of information on our account - be it an xml viewer or whatever; at least for members.

But I have a very unique build I don't want anyone to see.

*grin* Nice PhobicOne... Its for things like that that I wish I was saving profiles.

I was discussing with a friend a week or so ago the possibility of actually spreading disinformation with the character viewers. If the service was updating as fast as it normally does, and if you only left your good gear on while in a fight, you could easily put on 'fake' gear and skills to make your enemies use the wrong strats. Of course, these would only work for the first minute or so, but it could still be interesting.

As for me, I'll be staying away from your 1337 gearz.

This would be another good use for gear switching that was discussed in another thread. You could have a "crap" set that you could automatically switch too when you were done.

You have too much End and not enough INT Phobic... My build is the <\ubar/>

Then again, it is also messed up with BSOL trained to 6 instead of 5 like it it supposed to be..

Alrighty then,
I just pushed forward the change to my character sheet viewer. How it works now is this:

After the first time a character is viewed, the characters will only be updated every hour(ish). I say ish because I may tweak that up or down depending on feedback that I get from ya'll. This way its statistically a very bad idea to rely on the data to be accurate if you're trying to use it during a PvP match. Also, I hope this'll cut down on the bandwidth cost to NCSoft.

In a little bit, I hope to add some stats on to the site, so you guys can see which characters are the most requested, view random characters, etc.

Just because I knocked this change out so quickly (while watching my previous Cowboys lose) I'd ask that if you find any bugs, you either post on the forums, or PM me with the details.

Have a good evening all!

I don't care for my character information being viewable. However, I would be a fool not to use it since it is available.
Also, I really like the viewer at threeplanet. Very well done.
But now that there is a change that puts an extended timeframe on information provided, I guess I'll be going back to the original source, with the most current information.

My viewer will always be populated from the latest data on DR's server. Imho I respect their policy decisions on how often to update data.

sounds like a good idea snarky.

i personally am not bothered how it works but seen as no one has sed so already thank you for taking everyones ideas into account. most people shoud be happy now

I like your viewer demosthenez.
The other viewer is also good,but for some reason I prefer the demosthenez one

There's some crazy bug in my code right now. Hopefully I'll have a chance to kill it tonight. Until then, no characters are not updating, and I apologize. Thanks to the people who messaged me about this, once I get time I'll fix it (hopefully tonight).

Ok, got a chance to bug fix (after auditioning for Pirates of Penzance!) this evening. It turned out that my host had php 5 set up for Apache, but php 4 set up for cli.... which was really exceptionally painful to find out as that thought never crossed my mind.

Anyways, I *should* be back up. I'm finalizing my crontab as we speak, and all characters were updated about 20 minutes ago. To appease you all, I've tossed some stats on to the front page, number of unique characters viewed and number of total views. I'll be adding to those stats as I have time, so feel free to check back.

Issues

Yea, my design had an issue. Issue was I forgot about my design and figured "I won't get that many characters". As of right now, the db (which just stores a copy of the XML) has 683 characters in it, which means that I actually increased my hits to your service (since each was updated every hour) by... well... a factor of 8-9. This is a big mistake on my part, and I've reverted to non-caching code.

I'll rewrite it sometime tomorrow to use my original caching scheme that should be a *lot* more intelligent. The problem is a few characters are viewed a ton, and a lot are viewed just once. The top ten viewed, with number of views are:

Legendrunner 104
Segfault 98
Wreker 40
Rainger 33
Ghax 31
Bitburger 29
Rangedrange 28
Gothell 27
Freesia 26
Timthetortoise 26

Approximately 1000 of the 1142 unique name requests I've tracked in two days were repeated at most once. 805 of them were only accessed once (though this does include typos and 404s).

So, yea... I made a big screw up not sticking with my 'plan', and assuming things wouldn't get big enough. On the one hand I'm really flattered that many people use my service, on the other I'm really embarrassed to be caught in such a predicament.

Solutions

Now, what can we (people making viewers) do about this? Clearly any one popular viewer will run into issues eventually. The hits to my viewer have been increasing every day. If I were doing this as a network project, I'd say we need to distribute it, have a lot of little sites, basically each person using his own. But then you'll just get a LOT of repeats, if everyone has a cache of Legendrunner, for example, it ends up being worse that if one host is doing the caching.

I think this may be why Blizzard did Armory updates only once daily. It works just fine fow showing off a character in a sig block, and it lets you space out character updates throughout the day, not having 3/sec for 5 minutes at the top of each hour. I'm sorely tempted to drop my updating down to one a day, if need be, provided players who use it don't feel that makes it useless. In my opinion, of course, its still perfectly able to show off your build and gear, so there's really no difference between a 15 minute update, and an hour one.

Of course, part of this is also that I didn't anticipate my viewer being so popular. Heck, I had 60 hits in the 45 minutes since I switched back to the older version... I haven't spoken with Demos, but I'd imagine he's doing ok with viewers as well (and he has ads! Oh the money!), and you guys may want to rethink your XML policy. If you're willing to offer it, how popular are you willing to have it get? I was getting around 12-1300 hits a day when I tripped over the NOC the first time. Since its only getting more popular, those should go up. Of course, once I sit down and get my design straight it'll be a lot better, but even then it would only be a real help to about 10% of the requests.

In the end I think the only real 'solution' for this will be to host (and/or make) your own viewer, that's sitting darn close to the web server the stats come off of. Clearly as a freelance coder, I'll be sad to see my project slow down or die out, but at the same time that's probably the best move for you guys. That way you only send bandwidth out, you don't get hit both going and coming. It also makes false positive DoS attacks a lot less likely, since the majority of hits will be to your site, and be spread out among hosts. You won't have a case like my web server batch updating my cache at specified times.

Input

I'd really like to hear the input of Demos (and anyone else who put up a viewer) to get an idea of how many hits you're getting/if you're gaining popularity/how you're dealing with caching or limiting bandwidth. I'd *also* like to hear the input of the people who use these sites. Do you need up-to-the-minute updates? Could you settle for one a day? Are you trying to use it to gain an advantage in PvP? Or merely to have a place to point friends at to track character progress?

I'm not sure exactly what'll happen with my viewer/your XML feed, but I do humbly apologize for screwing the pooch in a grand ol' way this time round.

Thanks for your time, and hard work.



Edited by Snarky (01/15/08 11:11 PM)

Let me be clear: there is no issue, for us, with how many requests you were getting. The issue is that at the end of the hour, your caching mechanism re-requested every single character your site had ever seen. Based on what you've said, your site was already generating 2-3 hits on the XML feed per character request actually sent to your site in that hour. That magnification of demand was causing concern, but that doesn't mean that any part of the service was getting anywhere near a problem point.

How frequently we update the XML also has zero bearing on how many requests you (or anyone else) makes of the feed. I anticipate zero changes to the availability of the XML feed, or problems with our ability to meet demand for it. We expect to be able to manage significantly more demand than we are currently seeing, the only concern is that magnification of existing demand brings us closer to the point where we need to make further architectural changes (again, with a minimal impact on the timeliness of the data).

Heh, I made the top ten. I might be the only non PvP character on that list.

As to your question about once a day versus on demand or once per hour - once per day would be fine for me. I'd only use the viewer to give off general build information and to let folks know of general character progress.

I also think you're running into these issues because the viewer you made is so well done! You're a victim of your own success and the fact that people are curious. I'm hoping that you don't run into cost issues...that bandwidth can't be cheap if you're actually causing network issues for NC Soft!

hmmm figured LR would be up there... Wreker yea pretty obv but there are sum players i wouldnt of thought to be up there.

Myself im guessing im there for PvP or people not liking me and checking how nooby i am :P

and snarky to my knowledge the majority of people like and use ur view and you also demon so just ignore people flaming the char sheet viewers with there "secret build!" im sure its not that amazing anyway


RangedRange

That is one cool website, now i can check if people are lying about their ITEMS

Anson, I guess I misunderstood the problem. Misunderstandings happen frequently when I'm low on sleep and freaking out about other projects also. Just to fix any wrong impressions my post gave, the issue wasn't bandwidth, it was the speed/amount of my connections. I didn't impact NCSoft's bandwidth, merely triggered some alarms.

Demos, if/when you implement tracking, let me know. I'd love to swap data with ya.

I put up a viewer a couple of weeks ago at www.drplayers.com . My goal was to show player stats as they appear in the game. Presently I am reading the requested character’s xml data for each request. When valid data is returned I store the character name, xml data and last update time to a sql table. This allows me to create a dropdown list of valid characters and to implement a future caching mechanism if needed.

Hey, nice work! I tried to nab drplayers.com myself, but it looks like you're the one who beat me to it! I like your interface, that's some good work. I had contemplated such a system of selecting a previously shown character, but have had over 700 characters requested so I figured it wouldn't end up very handy in the end. I'm gonna go with a top 10, or top-25 view.

But nice!

EDIT: Oh, my only suggestion is to make the popups place themselves nicer. The ones that have long names go off too far to the right. Not sure what popup package you're using, but most will let ya have it place itself smartly.



Edited by Snarky (01/22/08 06:02 PM)

Thanks and nice work on your site to. Sorry about grabbing the domain name, if I decide to remove the site in the future I'll transfer it over to you. I will probably have to limit the characters in the dropdown list with a top 100 or so as well. I thought about dropping a character from the table after x days since last view to keep the list contained.

With the change to the reported equipment level, will we have a means to determine if the lvl 100 items are T1 - T3? Some of the player feedback I've gotten has been that they like to see that information in the viewer.

Thats what I get for using a widescreen display. I'll have to check that out. I did not use any js lib for it. I just placed the popup window to the lower left below the inventory pane and did a quick show, hide function. I never saw any item cause a problem. A few questions. What item or which character were you viewing and on what resolution? Also, did you have your browser set with a magnification over 100%?

I like having the set position at the lower left by default. I guess I could check for off screen on the div pane and adjust left if required. Another option may be to reduce the font size a bit to allow more characters.

It'll happen whenever the screen isn't wide enough to hold the tooltip as well. If I had my normal set up I'd be fine, but since I'm in the middle of moving I'm stuck with a dinky laptop. If you're willing to use an external JS package, check the one I include its FOSS and works nicely.

Thanks for the info. I'll try to take a look at it this weekend and maybe do something when the available window size is limited. Probably just prevent the right coordinate of the popup window from exceeding that of the inventory pane.

Demosthenez, Snarky...

All I gotta say is THANKS.

Without your character viewers I gotta say that my self-imposed task of adding content to The Townstons Wiki would have been ALOT more frustrating. I might have been the part of the cause of some of the high stat counts Snarky. I know I broke 150+ on some characters on both sites.

I appreciate the way Demosthenez's site layout, it sped up entering some of the RB's by just copying the stats at the bottom and nuking the numbers, we're now up to 139 RB's cataloged (not including the ones with multiple stats.


Anson,
I noticed on the feed that the negative numbers on armor is not list in the <mod> section. (Example: Plate body shows a -10% Movement Speed) Will that information as well as weapon speed info be made available on the feed?

Well, I spent some time this weekend adding some code to view what makes up a specific title. Its been on my list of things to do, and after the 'Dynamic Names' thread from a few days ago, I finally decided to hack something together.

To get to the titles, go to the main page here and then click on the titles link (its in a new paragraph). Or just click here. This will bring up the titles front page, which has a list of all the 'classes' it has seen. After clicking on the class you want to view, you can mouse over, or click on each title to see what level, skills, and attributes created it.

Alternatively you can click on the class name from any character's profile to jump right to that class's titles page.

My goal for this is to make it really, really neat and able to find relationships between titles really easily. This is just a first hack to get functionality up, while I figure out how to present the relationships between titles in a manner that's not too confusing.

Note: There's currently two bugs I'm working on right now, should have them fixed by tonight. If you see an extra line break in the list of classes, or a Pyromancer's profile isn't showing up correctly, please be patient, I'm working on them.

Wow, Snarky, it looks great!